Polymeric particles are increasingly being used as components in separation techniques and to assist with detecting analytes in both chemical and biological systems. For example, polymeric particles have been used in chromatographic techniques to separate target molecules from a solution. In another example, polymeric particles having a magnetic coating are utilized in magnetic separation techniques. More recently, polymeric particles have been used to enhance ELISA-type techniques and can be used to capture polynucleotides.
Nevertheless, such separation and analytical techniques have suffered as a result of variance in particle size. Large variance in particle size leads to variance in particle weight, as well as variance in the number of reaction sites available for interacting with target analytes. For magnetic separations techniques, variance in size can lead to low efficiency separations. For chromatographic techniques and various polynucleotide capture techniques, variance in size can lead to variance in the number of sites available for interacting with polynucleotides, leading to variance in capture or separation efficiency.